But ...

 

It is the first Solstice of the year. The email asks us to tune in at midday our local time and ‘quieten outwardly and rise inwardly’ to ‘be part of a great chain of LIGHT around the planet.’ It suggests we ‘can touch and bless the hearts and minds of all people as they walk on Mother Earth and with her creatures.’ 

I do that. Later, in the mid-winter evening with overcast sky, I don’t take my old body out to commune with the elements. Instead, I light candles on the tiny altar in a corner of my bedroom, and do a small ritual there. 

no moon no stars –

but beyond walls and clouds

their shining lights

I think about things to let go of now, and others to bring in. We adapt with age. As my body gradually wears out, it is no longer easy for me to travel, nor even go out at night. Yet I am very content to stay safe and warm at home with my little cat, to read and write and dream. 

long cold night –

but my small cat purrs

in her sleep

There is much trouble in the world today. Was it ‘ever thus’? It seems our troubles are far more desperate than those of the past. And yet, the world remains beautiful as far as I can see.

still dark out –

but the beginnings

of birdsong

Written for dVerse Haibun Monday: First Solstice.

The quotations in the first paragraph come from a friend's newsletter originating from White Eagle Lodge.

Reality

 

I invited my friends to write love poems for Valentine’s Day. ‘Glorious love!’ I proclaimed. 

But that was before police in Sydney knocked an old woman down so violently that it broke her spine in four places. It was before they held a young man on the ground and kidney-punched him over and over – which was caught on camera. It was before they forcibly dragged away a group of men who were sitting and praying; also caught on the news. 

The police have assured the public these things did not actually happen. 

The Police Minister told the Parliament, vehemently, that any future protest marches would be ‘antagonising the police.’ (Corollary: marchers will deserve any violence they receive.)

Only love can overcome hate, our great teachers have always told us. I believe them. But sometimes loving our enemies becomes difficult – our enemies who are supposed to be our protectors.

Yesterday I was still thinking, ‘Well at least we don’t live in America.’ But the sickness has spread.

We can barely believe what we are contemplating now on our TV screens.

I shut my eyes

those images remain –

I shut them harder 

See also (and for back story):

Guardian cartoon by First Dog on the Moon:

Written for Friday Writings #214 at Poets and Storytellers United.

Groundhog Day – or Not

 

I don’t understand Groundhog Day, not being American. I thought, because of the movie, it meant the same things happening over and over: one day endlessly repeated. But Frank Tassone, using it as a poetry prompt at dVerse, tells us it’s the day when the behaviour of a groundhog is used to forecast either coming Spring or a return to Winter. 

Puzzling. Spring always arrives, doesn't it, sooner later? 

But then he connects it to the Christian holiday, Candlemass, which he tells us is about anticipating when to plant seeds. Aha! so the ‘sooner or later’ of Spring’s arrival is the point.

I look up Candlemass for more detail. Instead, Google takes me straight to an account of the Pagan festival of Imbolc. 

Ah yes, same date. Now I get it! (Sometimes one has to dive a little deeper.)

That, however, is not quite the end of the story. Not for me. Here in Australia we have just come out the other side of a heatwave – not the only one we’ll get this Summer, I fully expect. Here, we are six months away from Imbolc. We have been celebrating Lughnasadh (aka Lammas). Well, some of us have. For Pagans, it’s a time to be thankful for the bounty of nature and the gifts from agriculture.

If we were to have a Groundhog Day here, it couldn’t be now. 

late summer –

we celebrate with bread

the good harvest

It Wasn’t Me Who Had the Epiphany

I kept bursting into tears! It was our first visit to Bali – me, Bill, and our two little boys. It was 1974, the tourist boom just beginning. We visitors would collectively alter that Paradise beyond retrieval … but we didn’t know so then. It was still unchanged. A naked family, showering under a roadside run-off, waved unembarrassed as our taxi passed.

the setting sun

falling slowly into

a wide flat sea

‘Island of the Gods’ the tourist books called it. We agreed. Enraptured as I was, why was I constantly bursting into sudden tears? 

We read the histories. Some postulated combined ancestry, Indian and Chinese. Later writers say those influences arose more from trade visitations. We could still find old Chinese coins, with holes in the middle, dropped in the street. I brought home three to use with my I Ching.

Suddenly Bill got it. ‘It’s the Indian in you!’ 

My maternal grandmother was mixed-race Anglo-Indian. (I have to add ‘mixed race.’ There are other definitions of the term, from the time of the Raj: one meaning completely English but living long in India, a second meaning completely Indian but thoroughly adopting British culture.)

He was right. It burst on me as revelation. It wasn’t the people but the artefacts. I was re-experiencing things I’d grown up with, lost along with my childhood. I was eating out of bowls I ate from in my grandparents’ home, I was surrounded by reminiscent ornaments, I was admiring familiar designs on cloth … 

There were connections with Chinese artefacts too. My mother’s family had put in there on the long boat trip from India to Tasmania, and bought some pieces. 

I’ll pass to descendants the carved Indian-silver containers and vases, the polished bamboo bowls with Chinese dragons painted around their outsides.

My Dutch-born husband wanted to visit Indonesia for the soul connection to an ancestor who had lived there and left diaries. I didn’t care. I hadn’t been out of Australia; I was happy to go anywhere. How odd that it was I who fell into connection with my Asian roots (who never got seventies Bali out of my blood for evermore). But …

I never returned 

to the isle of the gods –

vanished

Written for Haibun Monday: Epiphany at dVerse.

SM

What Did You Do in the War?

My first war, I travelled from newborn to six years old. Ration books and food shortages (yes, even in Australia) were a fact I never questioned. I lived among many more neighbouring women than men; in a house with my mother, my nana, my aunty, my girl cousin. 

My dad would arrive like a whirlwind: briefly, large and loud. For two nights I’d be kicked out of sharing Mummy's bed, then he’d be gone again. (With a crippled leg from a childhood accident, he couldn’t go to the war with most of the absent men. He was in a camp in central Australia with others not-quite-fit, training to protect us here if our country ever got invaded.)

no war here –

but fathers who came back (if)

as strangers

During the Korean War I was in my mid-teens, surviving my parents’ divorce, uprooted from my childhood home, acquiring an abusive stepmother, moving to Melbourne and going to uni, starting to date. I barely noticed the war. (I learned a version of it later, watching M*A*S*H.)

MASH taught me

American army life –

not Korea

Our longest war lasted from when I was still single and childless to my sons being in primary school. I marched in protests, I wrote letters to newspapers and politicians. Our Prime Minister reintroduced conscription shortly before announcing that Australia would join its ally, the USA, in Vietnam. Our next Prime Minister declaimed, ‘All the way with LBJ’. At the motorcade when LBJ visited Sydney, anti-war protestors lay down in the road. The State Premier yelled, ‘Run over the bastards!’

A TV newsflash too sudden to turn off: the My Lai massacre. ‘It isn’t true!’ declared my shocked six-year-old. ‘Australians would never do that!’ I had to tell him, ‘I’m afraid they did.’

At a huge rally in Melbourne, a young man spat on the road, heckling the marchers: ‘My mate died over there!’ 

‘Then why are you not marching with us?’ an elderly man demanded.

Over 80

I no longer march.

There are still wars.

My own New Year prompt for Friday Writings at Poets and Storytellers United is Fireworks!  Fireworks are intended to be celebratory – but I'm aware that there are people who can't cope with them because they have been through wars. The loud noises and flaring lights are reminiscent of shots and bombs, of horrors which no-one should have to endure and yet these people have lived through them ... and witnessed too many who didn't. So although this wasn't written to the prompt, and wasn't the sort of thing I had in mind when setting it, I feel it fits.

The Fall of the Leaf

 

Away in the Northern Hemisphere, the leaves are falling (I am reminded online) – leaves of gorgeous reds and yellows. In temperate Tasmania, where I grew up, sometimes, in some places, we saw such colours in Autumn, on trees introduced by the early European settlers. Here, now, in the sunny sub-tropics, my final settling-place, we seldom see anything but evergreens. I don’t mind that; I love the sun! And I love to be surrounded by all-year greenery, in this sweet rural town where trees line the roads and even the most urban streets.

In the Southern Hemisphere, we have Spring right now. One of the few deciduous tropical trees, the big frangipani that spreads all over the front wall of my home, has been starkly bare all winter (after its huge brown leaves littered the lawn; nothing pretty about them). Now it quietly begins to revive, putting forth tiny, spiky shoots at the ends of a few branches. I look forward to the fragrant flowers which will come.

ageing, slowing

I watch the seasons renew –

how much longer?

Written for Haibun: "The Fall of the Leaf"  at dVerse.

'I Labour by Singing Light'

 (DylanThomas: ‘In My Craft or Sullen Art’.)

Well yes, Dylan, mate, I suppose it is a labour. We can spend hours getting it all just right, or as right as we can (seldom quite perfect). Even more so than prose: not only every word needing to be the right one and in the right place, but every piece of punctuation – every blooming space, when we’re writing free verse. The crafting, indeed.

It’s true. It is our work. THE work, whatever else we may do to feed ourselves and keep a roof overhead. Yet it feels like play: the most absorbing and delightful play. When I’m most deeply involved, ‘I’ disappear; there is only writing. This is what I exist for. And, as you say, we do it regardless of ‘praise or wages’ (or, very much more often, their lack).

I’m with you, too, about that singing light, ‘when only the moon rages’. The moon has always been my muse. As a child, I used to gaze on her for hours through my high, uncurtained bedroom window: a presence both magical and reassuring. I began writing poems when I was seven. 

A natural night owl – as well as, for many years, otherwise occupied during my days (studies, employment, child raising ...) – I have usually worked on my poems late at night, with the moon looking in at me through a window. It still happens; although now, old and widowed, I can organise my time as I like.

 

Once, when my adult son visited, I said to him as he was heading for bed, ‘I might stay up awhile and do some writing.’

‘Try to keep the surprises to a minimum,’ he said, straight-faced. I stared at him blankly.

‘Mum!’ he said, ‘You’ve been doing that as long as I’ve known you.’ 

September moon –

lighting my desk each night

in slow waxing

Written for Haibun Monday 9-1-25: Labor at dVerse.

('In My Craft or Sullen Art', which Frank Tassone quoted as part of this prompt, has long been one of my favourite poems.)